City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of stories about the fictional city of Ambergris. It’s not exactly a short story collection, because these are not traditional short stories / novellas. All the stories are very different in shape and style, and even in layout and typography.
The tone of the book is generally funny, but with dark overtones of horror (more apparent in some stories than in others). Ambergris has this creepy, melancholy, dark aura. There are vaguely evil dwarfs, dangerous fungi swamping the city, priests of strange religions, an alien threat possibly lurking beneath the surface of the city, and so on. And it seems to rain almost all the time.
In this spooky city, a few straightforwardly spooky tales take place: “Dradin, In Love” is a story of love tinged with madness; “The Cage” is a horror story; in “The Transformation of Martin Lake” (the best of them all) a crisis transforms a mediocre artist into a sublime one; etc.
But the book also contains an excerpt from a supposed “Guide to the early history of the city”, an amateur naturalist’s pompous tract about the famed freshwater squid of Ambergris (complete with bibliography), letters, etc. There is even a story about a delusional writer who tries to convince an Ambergrisian that he has in fact created Ambergris.
The various parts are all linked, but not strongly. It is not necessary to read all of them to enjoy them. Especially the four main stories would stand on their own, and indeed an earlier version only contained those: VanderMeeer has apparently added material to the book over time.
Some of these component parts are very well written, and “The Transformation of Martin Lake” has won (well-deserved) awards as a standalone book.
Other “stories” are really only interesting because of the background information they provide. Still others are just plain boring: padding inserted by a self-indulgent author, slowing the pace to a crawl. Who wants to trawl through 40 pages of made-up bibliography about squid studies, no matter how many clever nuggets of information the author has hidden there? I guess it’s supposed to give the impression that this is an entire world, of which we only see bits and pieces, but instead it gives a chaotic, jumbled impression.
It doesn’t help that some of the stories openly contradict each other, or that the chronology is very unclear. (Some stories seem to happen centuries later than others, but I might be wrong.) This confusion entirely intentional, of course, which brings me to my main gripe: the book is far too postmodernistically self-aware and self-referential. Too many footnotes, too many stories supposedly written by fictional Ambergrisian authors, stories that are supposed to highlight the vagueness of “truth” etc.
Critics, of course, love this kind of book, even hinting that you’re a bit dull if you don’t get it. “This beautifully written, virtually hallucinatory work isn’t for every taste, but connoisseurs of the finest in postmodern fantasy will find it enormously rewarding.” The book seems to be so highly regarded by other writers that their reviews ape the book’s form: here and here, for example. Well, in my world “hallucinatory” is generally not a compliment.
I found this book really frustrating. Several times I got stuck and was annoyed with it and had to leave it for a few days. It took me several weeks to get through it. And yet I didn’t want to give up, because there just might be more of those brilliant bits (and indeed there were).
So if you’re “a connoisseur of the finest in postmodern fantasy” or otherwise fond of postmodernist stuff, you’ll get lots of it here, and of good quality. Personally, I prefer more coherent and traditional writings. While this had some great parts, the whole was not satisfying.
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